Every Time We Say Goodbye (7 page)

“Listen, Gracie,” Frank said, then fell silent.

“She wants to leave him alone in the dark,” Grace said. “She lets him cry.” He was a
baby
. It made no sense.

“She worked for Dr. McCabe’s family,” Frank said. “She helped his wife with all their babies. Now, wouldn’t a doctor and a doctor’s wife know what’s best for a baby?”

Grace dropped her hands from her face. “I know what’s best for him.”

Frank shook his head. “I don’t think you do, and I can’t be in the middle like this. Enough is enough. From now on, what Vera says goes.”

What Vera said was, the baby would come with her to town in the mornings. Mrs. McCabe loved to see Danny, and so did Vera’s sister, Anne. Grace wanted to come to town too, but Vera said no. Mrs. McCabe had a reputation to protect. Grace said nothing. She was afraid of Mrs. McCabe because of the Children’s Aid Society. They took babies away from mothers without
husbands. They had taken Millie Henderson’s baby away. Vera said that the Children’s Aid could come and make a visit. If they found Danny not being cared for properly, they would take him away. They could do that; it was their jurisdiction.

Grace was sorry she hadn’t told them about John Cherniak. Frank would have gone over to talk to his parents, and when John came back from the war, he would have married her. They would have moved to town like he wanted, and even if they didn’t, the farm wouldn’t have been so bad. She could have worked in the house while Danny played on a blanket beside her. She could have worked in the fields while Danny slept in a basket under a tree. John’s mother, with her black bonnet, wouldn’t have cared how much she kissed her own child. John’s mother had already had children, and her daughters in town all had children of their own. There would be lots of babies to go around. Then there were the things she and John had done by the creek—they could do those things any time they wanted, and she could have had brothers and sisters for Danny.

But it was too late for all that. No one would marry her now.

What she needed was a place of her own. At night, she transformed herself and Danny into foxes or blackbirds and found a place in the woods that Vera could not get to, and then she was able to sleep, but in the morning, she was ashamed.
You are not a bird
, she told herself angrily.
You can’t live in a tree
.

What she needed was money, to pay for a real place.

What she needed was a job. But what jobs were there for women who didn’t know how to do any jobs? She didn’t even know who to ask, except Vera, and that was out of the question. Then, at the beginning of December, Vera surprised her.

“W
ell, Mrs. May’s daughter is certainly doing well for herself,” Vera said while they peeled potatoes at the kitchen table. Snow hissed softly against the windows. “Remember how she got in trouble last year and went down south? Now she has a job there.” Grace did not remember, but her entire body went erect and a tremor ran through her fingers.

“She’s making a good eighteen, nineteen dollars a week now.”

“Where does she stay?” Grace asked. Her voice was uneven, but she kept peeling.

“She stayed at the YWCA at first,” Vera said. “Now she’s got an apartment with another girl. That’s what they do, the girls. They get together and share a place.”

“I wonder how she knew where to get a job.”

“Advertisement in the paper. She got there on a Sunday night, and by Tuesday morning she was working.” Vera sliced the potatoes and dropped them into a colander. “No one knows
her down there; she can start fresh. She’ll probably meet a fellow and get married.”

Grace began to sweep the peelings into a pile. “What kind of job?”

“A cereal company. Mrs. May showed me a photo of the two of them, Bridget and her roommate. They were going to Niagara Falls for a holiday, and they had on the cutest hats.”

“Did she know how to do that work before she got there?”

“Oh that,” Vera said. “No. They trained her.”

The potatoes were finished, but Vera and Grace sat at the table, the silence between them lengthening until Vera said, “If you wanted to do something like that, Grace, I’d be behind it.”

Grace didn’t look up, but her heart jerked and began to race. She could see them, Danny and her, in a little apartment, sitting together in the window seat, looking out onto the tops of trees. In her mind, she kissed the top of Danny’s head and drank in the smell of his hair.

“I could talk to Mrs. May,” Vera said. “Find out where Bridget is working. Maybe Bridget could introduce you at the factory. Would you like to do something like that?”

Grace said, “Yes.”

“Well!” Vera looked surprised. Then she beamed. “Well, good! It might be just the thing for you.”

“But I don’t know how … I mean, how would I …”

“Oh, they just want decent, able-bodied people. They’ll show you how to do the work.”

“I mean, I don’t know what I’d do with Danny while I was at work.”

Vera blinked. “What you would do with Danny.”

“Yes. If I found someone who could watch him—”

Vera’s face snapped shut and she snatched the colander off the table. “And here I thought you’d finally gotten your head
out of the clouds! You can’t take Danny down there! A woman with a baby and no husband—they won’t even look at you. And even if you did get a job, which you wouldn’t, you’d have to pay some stranger to look after Danny while you were at work.” She slammed the colander into the sink. “What you would do with Danny! Honest to goodness, Grace. I don’t know what goes on in your head sometimes.”

Grace went into the living room and squeezed in beside Danny on the sofa. He was asleep, his fists tucked under his chin, surrounded by pillows so he wouldn’t fall. She studied the shadow his lashes made against his cheek, the arc of his mouth. Did Vera really think she could go live hundreds of miles away from Danny?
I don’t know what goes on in
her
head sometimes
, Grace thought.

At supper, Vera and Frank talked about the war and which men were seeing action and whether anything good could come out of the alliance with Stalin. Grace cut her potatoes into smaller and smaller pieces. “Frank, do they hire women at the plant?”

“Sure, there are plenty of women working in the offices,” he said.

Vera scowled at her. “They’re educated women,” she said. “They went to secretarial school.”

“But in the plant part?” Grace persisted.

“There are some now,” Frank said. “Why?”

Vera answered for her. “We were talking about Mrs. May’s daughter this morning. She’s got a job down south, and Grace said she wouldn’t mind doing something like that. If you aren’t going to eat, Grace, take your plate to the kitchen.” Grace took her plate to the kitchen and stood behind the door, listening.

Frank said he didn’t like the idea of Grace going away. He didn’t see why she shouldn’t try to find work here in Sault Ste. Marie. Not at the plant—that probably wasn’t the place for her—but if
she wanted to work, she could probably find something, and Vera could look after the baby in the day.

In the kitchen, Grace shook her head. Vera was already looking after Danny in the day; that was not the solution.

Vera said, “But she can’t get a fresh start here, Frank. You know how people talk. If she goes down there, she can build a new life for herself. Look at Bridget May. She has her whole life ahead of her now.”

Frank sighed and said he didn’t know. He just didn’t know what to think anymore.

Later, washing the dishes, Vera said, “Grace, you need to go away where nobody knows you. And you can’t take the baby because you have to work.”

“I could pay someone to look after him,” Grace said, wiping the soapy tines of a fork. “I could find someone nice.”

“You wouldn’t make enough,” Vera said. She wiped her hands and got out a paper and pencil. “Come here. I’ll show you.” Grace sat beside her and watched her write
$80
at the top of the paper. “Let’s say you make this much a month. This is how much you’d pay for rent. Then you’d have to pay for your bus fare. And groceries. And clothes for yourself.”

“I don’t need clothes.”

“You’d need clothes if you were working. You can’t go to work in your old housedress. And Danny needs clothes. Shoes. Winter boots. They outgrow things so fast. Plus other things—if he got sick, you’d have to pay the doctor. You’d have to buy medicine.”

Grace looked at the paper. Vera hadn’t finished. “Now you have to pay someone to care for Danny. Do you see?” There was less than no money left.

Grace saw. She was also suspicious. If there was no money left, how was Mrs. May’s daughter buying new hats and going to Niagara Falls? She said, “I can’t leave Danny.”

“Why don’t you just go down for a few months after Christmas and try it out?”

Grace said, “We’ll see,” which is what Vera said when she meant no but didn’t want to discuss it.

Vera seemed to think it meant something else, though, because as Grace was going upstairs, she said, “And don’t worry about your brother. I’ll talk to him.”

Up in her attic room, Grace sat with her head in her hands, trying to think of a way out, but all her ideas ended in rags and rooms with dirt floors and the Children’s Aid Society at the door. If she stayed, at least she and Danny would have a roof over their heads. She would just have to avoid fighting with Vera. If she didn’t fight with Vera, Vera wouldn’t fight with Frank, and Frank wouldn’t look pained and pinched when he told Grace to stop fighting with Vera. If she didn’t fight with Vera, she could be with Danny, which was all that mattered.

But not fighting with Vera was hard. Not fighting with Vera meant she couldn’t be with Danny anyway, because she was in the basement running clothes through the wringer or outside knocking icicles from the eaves while Vera took Danny to town and had his picture taken at Venini’s Studio. Not fighting with Vera meant Vera decided what Danny could eat and when he should sleep, where he could play and whether he was too old for Grace to be singing nonsense songs to him.

Danny’s legs were lengthening like crazy weeds; he climbed out of his pillow fortress on the floor and crawled everywhere, frowning at every object that came his way. When he recognized it, his face broke suddenly into radiance; then he put it into his mouth. “Danny!” Grace laughed helplessly, extracting the chewed-up leg of the woolly lamb. “You can’t eat that.” He babbled sweetly, just syllables, but sometimes, they matched what he saw. “Ba ba,” he said to the ball. “Ma ma ma,” he said to Grace.

At dinner, Vera told Frank, “Oh, and Danny called me mama today.”

Grace pushed her chair back, her face suddenly hot and her hands trembling. “He did not,” she said.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Vera said. “He doesn’t know the difference.”

“He knows who his mother is,” Grace said, her voice rising wildly. Vera told her to lower her voice, she would wake the baby. Grace wanted to weep and throw up all the words she had swallowed ever since Frank had said, “From now on, what Vera says goes.” She wanted to stamp her feet and pull out her hair and hit Vera over the head with the casserole dish of scalloped potatoes, crack her skull like an egg. “He’s my baby,” she yelled, and she flung her plate over the table onto the floor. Frank shouted, “Grace! That is enough! Go upstairs and don’t come down for the rest of the night.” In the living room, Danny wailed, and Vera rushed from the table. Frank pointed to the staircase. “Go,” he said.

Not fighting was impossible.

She took Danny up to her room and held him on her lap, stroking his dark blond hair. He played with her fingers and she told him that she had to go away for a while, to find work and a place to live, to see if it was possible for a woman with a baby to have a job and make a home. It would be unbearable for her, every minute, but she would endure it for him, and he must endure it for her. “Do you understand, Danny?” she asked him, and he wriggled deeper into her lap and nestled his head under her chin.

“Grace!” It was Vera at the bottom of the stairs. “Where’s the baby? You better not be up there playing with him like he’s a doll!”

Grace buried her face in her son’s neck and wept.

It was unthinkable. It boggled the mind and broke the heart. It ran against the running of all things. It was not doable, and yet she was doing it. She was putting clothes into the straw-coloured suitcase. Fold, fold, tuck. She had to stop every few minutes because her chest would begin to burn and the room would grow dim, and she’d realize she wasn’t breathing.

She looked around. “Now, make sure you have everything,” Vera said every time she came upstairs. “Your comb, your toothbrush. Did you pack those new blouses I made you?” There was still the photo of Danny in the frame, but she would carry that in her purse. The cupboard drawers were askew, empty except for scraps of paper and yarn. Everything Grace owned and nothing she wanted was in the straw-coloured suitcase. The only thing that mattered to her was the only thing she would leave behind.

Frank said, “I don’t agree with this. You don’t
have
to go away, Gracie. You just have to try to get along with Vera. Work more as a team. Give and take. She just wants what’s best—”